Yes, a robot car that drives on its own will be a better driver than most humans who text and drive, or have 400ms reaction times.
But making a machine that can beat a 110ms reaction time human with 2SD+ IQ, and the ability to override the ground controllers with human curiosity is much harder. Humans have high dexterity, are extremely capable of switching roles fast, are surprisingly efficient, and force us to return back home.
So in terms of total science return, one Apollo mission did more for lunar science and discovery than 53 years of robots on the surface and in orbit.
This is a fair question. The closest answer I can get is eyes and ears onboard complement sensors.
True. I wasn’t thinking about training the ground crews.
This is not just training the current flight crew and ground crews, but is also generally testing the entire system - including operations and hardware too, with feedback important to logistics and component manufacturers, etc. With possible exception of Falcon 9 launches, space missions are still infrequent enough that each of them is providing knowledge and experience meaningfully relevant to all work in and adjacent to space exploration and space industry.
> Apollo was over three orders of magnitude more efficient in producing scientific papers per day of fieldwork than are the MERs. This is essentially the same as Squyres’ (2005) intuitive estimate given above, and is consistent with the more quantitative analogue fieldwork tests reported by Snook et al. (2007).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Ultraviolet_Camera/Spectro...
Money being fungible and all, the rest can pretend their tax money is going exclusively to their favorite programs, whether that's healthcare or environment or building roads or starting wars or funding more startups or whatever.
Even with a goal of eventually putting humans on the moon, it'd be better to do an automated run, measure everything in the cockpit, and put in sandbags and/or something to consume O2 to make sure the CO2 scrubbers are working correctly. It's maybe cruel, but a few dogs would work fine for that sort of thing. A flame would be better, but it's pretty dangerous.
The first mission in decades doesn't need to have humans in it.